In the Miso Soup
Ryu Murakami, 1997 (Eng. trans., 2003)
Penguin Group USA
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143035695
Summary
Another roller-coaster ride from a master of the psycho-thriller!
It looked as though Maki had another mouth below her jaw. Oozing from this second, smiling mouth was a thick, dark liquid, like coal tar. Her throat had been slit literally from ear to ear and more than halfway through, so that it looked as if her head might fall right off. And yet, incredibly, Maki was still on her feet and still alive, her eyeballs swiveling wildly and her lips quivering as she wheezed foam-flecked blood from the wound in her throat. She seemed to be trying to say something...
It is just before New Year's. Frank, an overweight American tourist, has hired Kenji to take him on a guided tour of Tokyo's sleazy nightlife on three successive evenings. But Frank's behavior is so strange that Kenji begins to entertain a horrible suspicion: that his new client is in fact the serial killer currently terrorizing the city. It isn't until the second night, however, in a scene that will shock you and make you laugh and make you hate yourself for laughing, that Kenji learns exactly how much he has to fear and how irrevocably his encounter with this great white whale of an American will change his life.
Kenji's intimate knowledge of Tokyo's sex industry, his thoughtful observations and wisecracks about the emptiness and hypocrisy of contemporary Japan, and his insights into the shockingly widespread phenomena of "compensated dating" and "selling it" among Japanese schoolgirls, give us plenty to think about on every page. Kenji is our likable, if far from innocent, guide to the inferno of violence and evil into which he unwillingly descends-and from which only Jun, his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, can possibly save him. (From the publisher.)
Author Biography
• Birth—February 19, 1952
• Reared—Sasebo, Nagasaki, Japan
• Education—Musashino Art University
• Awards—Noma Liberal Arts New Member Prize;
Hirabayashitai Children’s Literary Prize; Yomiuri
Literature Prize
• Currently—lives in Japan
Ryunosuke Murakami is a Japanese novelist and filmmaker. He is colloquially referred to as the "Maradona of Japanese literature. (His name Ryunosuke was taken from the main character in Daibosatsutoge a fiction by Nakazato Kaizan, 1885–1944).
Murakami attended primary, middle and senior high school in Sasebo. While a student in senior high, Murakami helped form a rock band, in which he was the drummer. After the band’s breakup, he went on to join the rugby club, which he found especially grueling. He soon left the rugby club and transferred to the school’s newspaper department. In the summer of his third year in senior high, Murakami and his colleagues barricaded the rooftop of his high school and he was placed under house arrest for three months. During this time, he had an encounter with the hippie culture which influenced him greatly.
Murakami graduated from high school in 1970, around which time he went on to form yet another rock band and produce 8-millimeter indie films.
Murakami went to Tokyo and enrolled in the silkscreen department in Gendaishichosha school of art, but dropped out halfway through the year. In October 1972, he moved to Fussa near the base of the U.S. army and was accepted into the Musashino Art University in the sculpture program.
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Murakami's first work, the short novel Almost Transparent Blue, written while he was still a student of Musashino Art University, deals with promiscuity and drug use among disaffected Japanese youth. Critically acclaimed as a new style of literature, it won the newcomer's literature prize in 1976 despite some observers decrying it as decadent. Later the same year, Blue won the Akutagawa Prize, going on to become a best seller. In 1980, Murakami published the much longer novel Coin Locker Babies, again to critical acclaim.
In 1980, Murakami received the 3rd Noma Liberal Arts New Member prize for his novel Coin Locker Babies. Afterward he wrote an autobiographical work, 69. His next work, Ai to Genzou no Fascism (1987), revolves around the struggle reforming Japan’s Survival of the Fittest model of society, by a secret society, the "Hunting Society". His work in 1988, Topaz, is about a SM Girl’s radical expression of her sex
Murakami’s story The World in Five Minutes From Now (1994) is written as a point of view in a parallel universe version of Japan, which got him nominated for the 30th Tanizaki Junichiro prize. In 1996 he continued his autobiography 69, and released the Murakami Ryu Movie and Novel Collection. He also won the Hirabayashitai Children’s literary prize. The same year, he wrote the novel Topaz II about a female high school student engaged in compensated dating activities, which later was adapted as a live action film Love and Pop by Anime director Hideaki Anno.
In 1998 he wrote the Psycho-horror styled story In the Miso Soup which won him the Yomiuri Literature Prize. In 1999 he became in the Editor in Chief of mail magazine JMM which discusses the "bubble" economy of Japan. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
It is a testament to the strengths of Ryu Murakami's novel that it is ultimately defined not by its explicit depictions of violence and sex but instead by its misfit characters. In this skillful translation by Ralph McCarthy, Kenji is an appealing narrator, observant without being judgmental and nervous without being melodramatic; even the intensely creepy Frank is not entirely unsympathetic.
Curtis Sittenfeld - New York Times
In the unlikely event that you think wandering through the sex clubs of Tokyo in the company of a psycho killer might be a warm and fuzzy experience, In the Miso Soup will disabuse you of the notion. Ironically, the obligatory gore scene — cartoony and cold like something out of Quentin Tarantino — is less disturbing than Ryu Murakami's meditations on urban loneliness and disconnection, Japanese — and American — style.
Elizabeth Gold - Washington Post
Beyond one terribly shocking scene, Miso is a thoughtful novel about loneliness, lack of identity and cultural and moral corruption. Through simple yet chilling language, Murakami doesn't condemn his characters. Instead he takes aim at rampant consumerism and the dumbing-down of Japanese and American culture. No one, Murakami seems to say, is completely guilty because we are shaped by the world around us.
Christopher Theokas - USA Today
A compelling nightmare for...the reader [in which] everyone remains in evil's thrall until it's too late. A wicked meditation on the worst traits of American and Japanese society, this is a creepy culture clash indeed. — Frank Sennett
Booklist
Hipster Murakami follows a sex tour guide through the sleazy demimonde of Tokyo's worst streets during three nights on the town with a serial killer.... A blistering portrait of contemporary Japan, its nihilism and decadence wrapped up within one of the most savage thrillers since The Silence of the Lambs. Shocking but gripping.
Kirkus Reviews
Book Club Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for In the Miso Soup:
1. Talk about Frank. What is it — initially — that disturbs Kenji about him? Did you suspect him in the beginning — or consider him a red-herring (a false lead)?
2. As the story progresses, Kenji becomes increasingly troubled by Frank and complains about him to his girl friend. Why, then, does he continue to escort Frank around Tokyo? What is about Frank that draws Kenji to him?
3. Several vignettes build tension and dread...and portray Japan's dismal sex trade. Talk about those episodes and what they reveal about Japanese culture.
4. What about some the prostitutes: the one, for instance, who claims she won't fly economy...or the one who is disappointed to learn about Hilton hotels? Do you find their snobbery comical...or offensive...or...?
5. Kenji says he comes to see the victims as "filled with sawdust and scraps of vinyl, like stuffed animals, rather than flesh and blood." What does he mean here? Why is it hard for him to view the victims as flesh and blood human beings?
6. Why does Kenji decide not to report Frank to the police? What is the significance of Frank's parting gift to Kenji — a swan feather?
7. Ryu Murakami uses his narrator, Kenji, as a window through which readers observe Japanese society. What do you see that surprises you? Are there similarities between the Japanese and Western cultures?
8. Is this novel sleazy sensationalism? Or is it social commentary? If so, on what is Murakami commenting...and does he succeed in his attempts?
9. Murakami paints a sort of dystopia in which prostitutes are truthful, our so-called "sane" society has descended into a kind of madness, and Frank becomes heroic in his resistance to its pull. Do you agree with that interpretation?
10 Kenji and Frank discuss parallels between Japan and the U.S. — that neither country has had to adapt its culture to another, for example. Do you think their assessment are accurate?
11. What was your experience reading this book — were you filled with tension and anxiety? Were you offended by the violence? Were you interested in the characters? Did the ideas strike you as insightful?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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